2003 Bugatti Veyron

987 Freakin' Horses!

"1001 horsepower and 1250 newton-meters." Those were the headline figures when Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch announced, at the Geneva show, that the Bugatti EB16/4 Veyron is going into production.

Dr. Piëch wants no arguments about this: The new Bugatti will be the world's most powerful production car, period. He is very precise that the 8.0-liter 16-cylinder engine will produce 1001 horsepower, not 1000. But that is on the European ECE horsepower scale. In our parlance the engine will make a not-exactly-paltry 987 SAE-net horses. And the torque figure translates to 922 pound-feet. For perspective, the first production Bugatti from the VW empire will make more power than a CART race car. Or, the 16/4 Veyron will have more power than two Porsche 911 GT2s (the most powerful street Porsche ever) and an original VW Beetle, combined. However you read it, that's enough to make the new Bugatti the fastest street car of them all-if you can get at least half the horses to the ground, that is.

But for the time being, Piëch isn't talking performance numbers. The Veyron won't be available until the end of 2003, and then it will be built in very small quantities (50 to 60 a year) and sold at a very high price (say, $750,000).

It was at a private party in Carmel, California, last August that Volkswagen confirmed that Bugatti, one of the greatest car names of the 1930s, would restart production. Volkswagen had already restored the Chateau St. Jean adjacent to Bugatti's ancestral home in Molsheim, France, for use as a marketing and customer reception center and announced its intention to build a new factory alongside it. What it did not say then was what kind of car it would build. Irked at the loss of Rolls-Royce to BMW, Piëch was thought to favor a grand luxury sedan along the lines of the art deco EB118 show car designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. But in reality-and, we admit, it is hard to treat this as anything resembling reality-the super-rich will only pay so much for a limousine, however elaborate. The new Bugatti had to be the ultimate sports car.

The Veyron was the second of two mid-engined sports-car concepts shown by Bugatti. It was designed in the Volkswagen studio headed by Hartmut Warkuss and is named after Pierre Veyron, a Bugatti driver who won at Le Mans in 1939.

When first presented, at the 1999 Tokyo auto show, it had an 18-cylinder version of one of VW's modular engines, but the production model will use the 64-valve W-16 first seen in the Bentley Hunaudières concept. The engine is effectively a doubled-up version of the W-8 soon to be available in the VW Passat. To produce the 987 horsepower, VW fitted the W-16 with four turbochargers, variable valve timing, and a direct-injection system.

That 922 pound-feet is available from 2200 rpm. "The thrust is like a jet," says Karl-Heinz Neumann, the head of Volkswagen engine development who has been named as the president of the newly established Bugatti Automobiles SAS. We believe him.

The W-16 drives through a six-speed gearbox, ahead of the engine (as in a Lamborghini) to all four wheels. The prototype is built on a Lamborghini Diablo chassis, but the production car will have an aluminum space-frame body and chassis constructed using Audi A8 principles.

The reigning king of the supercars is the million-dollar McLaren F1, produced between 1994 and 1998. With 618 horsepower and 479 pound-feet, its naturally aspirated 6.1-liter BMW V-12 engine propelled it from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds, from 0 to 100 mph in 6.3, and to a top speed of 221 mph in our August '94 test. The Bugatti 16/4 Veyron should do better than that.